Saturday, March 23, 2013

It occurred
to me I really should do a wrap-up post for the blog since it doesn’t look like
I’ll be posting here much anymore. I think I simply hit that wall that many
bloggers who’ve blogged for a few years hit. Been there, done that, time to
move on to something new. Not without regret, of course. It’s been a great
place to work out and share the first steps of my self-publishing journey, as
well as a great place to share data and put forward marketing theories. Had I
known earlier self-publishing could involve so many lovely spreadsheets and
data analyses, I would have jumped in far sooner!

In that
spirit, I thought it appropriate for this post to cover three topics:

Amazon Select Then And Now – One Book’s Journey

Steel Magnolia Press – One Year Later

The Latest On The Pop List Watch – Math-Free
Version!

AMAZON
SELECT THEN AND NOW – ONE BOOK’S JOURNEY

I first
enrolled SECTOR C in Select on January 6, 2012. Since then, it’s gone free 10
times. It’s always lucked out and had fairly good runs, and was one of the
books that saw immediate success in the Golden Age of Amazon Algos, when free
book downloads were counted as real sales. It hit #1 on the SF poplists a few
times and made a couple of appearances (with its old cover) on the Amazon splashpage for ebooks.

When authors
ask whether or not frequent free eventually reaches saturation, I point to
SECTOR C. In a string of 8 months where SC went free each month, it still had a
decent showing of 11,000+ downloads in the 8th month. And, after
being downloaded about 63,000 times in the 9 free runs prior, it still managed its
best run yet on its 10th time out.

Granted, it
had a little help via a BookBub ad on Day 1 followed by a late rally on Day 4
from a FKBT mention, which resulted in over 44,000 downloads. It hit #1 Free in the
store late in the day on its first day free and then again on the afternoon of
its second free day.

But what of
the post-free sales bounce? In January 2012, SC had 16,000 free downloads, then
went on to sell 1930 copies, netting over $4300. Bless those old algorithms!

After its
late February 2013 run with 44,300 downloads, it’s had over 750 sales+borrows,
with an anticipated 30-day total of 850 sales, with a net of about $2000.
Almost 3 times the number given away this year resulted in less than half the
number of sales and royalties from January last year. Still, it sextupled what
had been its monthly sales average for the 5 months prior, so I still count
what was probably its last free run for a while a grand slam.

In all,
SECTOR C (pubbed Sept 1, 2011) has earned about $17,000 over its lifetime. Not a groundbreaking figure,
but one I’m still pretty pleased with.

Does Select
Free still “work”? (Weren't we asking that same question back in August?) For many of the titles in the Steel Magnolia Press
inventory, the answer is YES, with caveats. Those caveats are common sense. Freebook
site mentions, of course, play a huge part. But we have titles that can still hit
high in the Top 100 without a major site mention, even competing against titles
with BookBub, POI and ENT backing. That’s due in large part to one or more of
the following:

being
penned by a name author

being a boxed
set with a higher perceived value to begin with

being in
a highly popular genre

Shorter
works, titles without a high review rating, and/or titles that don’t get an
advertising push don’t do well. No surprises there. For those books, we have to
figure other strategies to get them noticed.

STEEL
MAGNOLIA PRESS – ONE YEAR LATER

On January 1,
2012, Steel Magnolia Press had my 2 novels and short essay collection and 3 of Jennifer
Blake’s novellas in its inventory, and had been in business for about 6 weeks.

Today, Steel
Magnolia has 50 titles by 4 authors published, with 49 of those titles in
Amazon Select. SMP also has an honorary bestselling Magnolia with 2 titles in
(though her sales are not included in our overall totals). We’ll be publishing
another backlist novel from Jennifer Blake, Sweet
Piracy, at the end of March, then a brand new book in Jennifer’s Italian
Billionaires Collection will release in early May. In June, we’ll put out 2
more box sets, then follow those this summer with 12 backlist novels as we give
the box sets a rest. On top of that, we have a handful of Blake’s backlist
novellas waiting to be formatted, and new titles to come soon(ish) from Tamelia
Tumlin and me. By the end of 2013, we’ll have close to 80 titles available once
we bundle some more of them up in time for Christmas giving.

But having a
large inventory and selling them are two different things. Now, we could go
with the KKR-DWS approach of pricing high, publishing to all platforms and then
ignoring the books as we move on to publishing the next. Instead, we
concentrate our marketing on Amazon, use the tools available there, advertise
strategically, and price competitively and aggressively to gain the visibility
that leads to more sales. Using this approach on mainly backlist titles has
worked well for us as we’ve grown Steel Magnolia to its current 50 titles, the
majority of which are novels and box sets.

When reading our sales figures, keep in mind
that we did not start publishing out Jennifer’s backlist novels until last July, and
then it was only 4-6 books per month from July-October. October also saw the
release of a brand new book by Jennifer, The Tuscan’s Revenge Wedding, which
hit #1 Free in the Amazon store with 37,000 downloads, jumped to #91 Paid overall, then went on to sell
25,000+ copies. In November, we bundled
the existing books into virtual boxed sets and released 8 of those. We published nothing
new in December, and then published two more box sets in January, with no new
titles being published in February and March.

One of the
box sets, the Louisiana Plantation Collection hit #14 Paid in Amazon in
December, stayed in the Top 100 through January, hopscotched in and out of the
Top 100 through February and finally fell out in March after selling well over
65,000 copies. As I write this, it’s at #198.

In all, over
the past year, Steel Magnolia has had 10 separate titles in the overall Top 100
Paid bestseller list in the Amazon.com store, and several more ranked under
#1000.

96,581 of those sales have happened since January
1, 2013. I think, maybe, we’re finally getting the hang of this indie publishing thing ;o).

POP LIST
WATCH

Having been
among the first (maybe The First) to point out how Amazon uses the popularity
lists as tools in its internal marketing and recommendation engines -- and
changes those algos to better reflect the browsing and buying choices of its
readers and to better influence whatever buying choices it wants its customers
to be making -- I figured I should end by throwing out a couple of things for the
new Data Avengers among you to mull over.

First, the
UK is still using algorithms that are quite favorable to indies who run free,
whether via Select or price matching. Spoil of War was recently price-matched
to free in the UK for a couple of weeks, during which time it had 2077
downloads. When it came off free (by my choice, I no longer wanted it
price-matched so was actively trying to get Amazon to re-price the book to
paid), it was quite nicely ranked in the poplists:

#1 Arthurian
Fantasy

#1
Historical Fantasy

#5
Historical Fiction

#5 Fantasy

Those
rankings were true to the algorithms of the Golden Age of early 2012 that we
all knew and loved on the .com store. Sales
at the UK-equivalent of $3.78 began promisingly enough: 28 the first day after
it came off free, followed by 25 sales the next day. Followed by 4 sales the
next. Sigh. Amazon, in its infinite wisdom, had seen fit to re-price the book
to free again. Since it’s full price elsewhere, it could only be price-matching
some cached version of iTunes, or price-matching the US store.

Still,
enough of a glimpse to know the UK remains firmly entrenched in the Golden Age
algos. For now.

But here’s
the kicker on the .com site and the tease for all you data watchers. The higher
(better) SECTOR C climbed the poplists and the KOLL lists, the worse its sales
seemed to get, on average. Yes, even before that 30-Day Cliff that still looms ahead for SECTOR C. Yesterday was its best placement on those lists since being
free – but yesterday was its worst sales day yet.

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